Before the lesson:
please make sure you got the latest RStudio and latest R version installed.

Lesson objectives:
* learn to perform a search in academic literature database * download results / import into R * making simple bibliometric networks and plots

Lesson outline:
* About this lesson
* Getting the data * Summarising the data * Bibliographic networks * More resouces
http://www.bibliometrix.org/documents.html
http://revtools.net/


About this lesson

This lesson is prepared for these who are already familiar with R coding language, R markdown and RStudio. By the end of this tutorial you should be able to create a simple html document containing markdown-formatted text, images and R code, all in R Studio.


Getting the data

You can do analyses of literature on any topic. In this lesson we will have a look at the academic literature related to the concept of Terminal Investment. Terminal Investment hypothesis predicts increased investment of resources into reproduction as the chances of survival decrease. This can be observed as increased reproductive effort in older animals or in animals challenged with factors signalling threat to their survival (e.g. predation, pathogenes, parasites).

Terminal investment in animals is usually studied in three main ways:
1. via observational studies of correlations of age and reproductive effort,
2. in experimantal studies where animals are subject to immune challenges and their subsequent reprodactive effort is compared to unchallenged aninmals of the same age,
3. in experimantal studies where reproductive response to immune challenge is compared between animals of older ages versus younger ages.

You can read more on this Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_investment_hypothesis

We hope the topic is quite appealing and quiet easy to understand.There are several published reviews on terminal investment hypothesis and we can expect many publications related to this topic, as well as many researchers working on it. Is this so?

Thus, we will try to run bibliometric analyses on the relevant sample of literature. Note that some R packages (and many other online/software tools) are available (and more are being developed) that can perform some of the tasks during this exercise, and often much more. For your own project you may want to try to use some of them, but there is no single “perfect” tool fit for all possible analyses and that is easy and usable for all disciplines and types of research questions. Note that the main purpose of this exercise is to familiarize you with the basic principles/issues of bibliometric analyses, you can always learn more in your own time if you are interested.